City tree-planting program more than environmentalism

From left, Common Ground High School students Cheryl Bedard, 17, Joseph Stoudmire Jr., 16, Terrance Walker, 16, and Doris Jean Teel, 16, plant a tree on Edgewood Way in New Haven. Peter Hvizdak/Register

Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Science students worked alongside teens from Common Ground High School Friday as they planted a tree on Townsend Avenue. The students are helping to restore the city's tree canopy through the Urban Resources Initiative's internship program. PSEG Power Connecticut, which is near the site, has donated $25,000 toward the tree project. Melanie Stengel/Register

NEW HAVEN -- First of all, there is the sheer beauty.

Then there is the increase in property values, the sound-absorbing feature, the cooling aspect, traffic-calming benefit and the pride of a new job skill.

We are talking trees here. Lots of them. Hopefully 10,000 over five years.

Doris Jean Teel, 16, knows all about this first-hand. As someone who originally had no interest in the environment, Doris on her own is now reaching out to younger kids in her Newhallville neighborhood to get them involved in environmental projects.

Advertisement

A student at Common Ground High School, she is among a few dozen classmates each year who participate in a yearlong leadership and career development curriculum that places them in environmental job opportunities.

For Doris, this included learning the science, the cost-benefit analysis, the down-in-the-dirt nitty-gritty digging and planting of trees, as well as a snapshot of urban design principles and traffic engineering.

It took her and her classmates to parts of the city they were not familiar with, made them part of a team effort to accomplish one goal and put the more seasoned ones in positions of training the new kids, including a number of Yale University students who joined the effort.

"You had to develop the right eye. I learned a lot of stuff about what I could do," Doris said of her first job. "It taught me to keep pushing myself," said her classmate, Joseph Stoudmire Jr., 16, who added, "I provided a lot of the muscle."

This is all possible through a partnership between the school and the Urban Resources Initiative, which this year is expanding its green skills program to other populations.

A half dozen men re-entering society from prison and six more from the Crossroads substance abuse program, who have worked with URI before, will be part of the overall mix.

URI is a nonprofit agency affiliated with the Yale School of Foresty and Environmental Studies whose mission is to foster community-based land stewardship and environmental education.

Now that spring is here, all the participants and volunteers are planting six days a week toward their goal of 1,000 trees in public spaces every year for five years, to be matched by 1,000 more on private property as homeowners, institutions and businesses step up on this literally "shovel-ready" project.

"Trees, I think, really do have the power to build community," said Joel Tolman, a social science teacher and the director of development and community engagement at Common Ground.

TREES CALM TRAFFIC

One of the teens' accomplishments was an experiment on Edgewood Way, a blocklong street in Westville where residents wanted some traffic-calming changes.

But instead of installing roundabouts, bump-outs or pavement changes, the homeowners agreed to see if the redspire pear, the lilac trees, lacebark elm and European hornbeam now lining the street will do the job over time.

Planted last spring, the trees are blooming and subsequent waves of students will continue to study their benefit to the neighborhood for four years.

"If, at the end of the day, it didn't change anything (on traffic calming), we will still leave the street in better shape than when we arrived," said Jim Travers, deputy director at the city's Department of Transportation, Traffic and Parking.

"Typically, the older. more mature trees reduce traffic, but what we have done is planted enough trees to create a visual wall," Travers said.

Colleen Murphy-Dunning, executive director of URI, which has been planting trees in neighborhoods with volunteers for the past 15 years, decided to expand its effort by involving the teens and other groups after learning last year that more trees were coming down in New Haven than were being planted.

She and Travers were really taken with the students' interest and commitment and how the program is incorporated into a larger academic framework.

"It's really physically demanding hard work. You can't leave the job until the tree is in the ground. There is also a level of professionalism that we are trying to teach them. We have really high standards and the kids rise up to meet them," Murphy-Dunning said.

The students have made their baseline cost analysis and will continue to update it, adding information on the speed of traffic on the street.

People skills got honed too as the students interact with the neighbors, extracting promises from them to keep the new trees watered or simply explaining what they were doing.

"I would calmly repeat what I said," said Terrance Walker, 16, as he discussed the best approach to drawing in the uninitiated.

All of them talked about the fun of driving down a street where they have worked and spotting trees they helped plant. "Wow, I was there. I planted that tree," Doris said.

Tolman, who lives in the East Rock neighborhood, said not many residents have the opportunity to interact with high-school age kids in the city.

"Giving people all over the city an opportunity to see New Haven young people doing something in a positive light I think is a really exciting sort of unforeseen consequence of the program," he said.

Meg Graustein, who oversees the green jobs program at Common Grounds, said in addition to three job internships for the students, they cover such things as résumé writing, interview skills and how to interact with the boss.

She also brings in professionals tied to green jobs to talk to the students.

"Now they know what a traffic engineer is," said Travers of his own profession. "We are exposing them to possibilities that they never contemplated before."